Pins & Needles: The Ascent
by sevenpercent
Summary: Part of the Pins and Needles Series, following the end of On the Rack, this answers at least some of the readers' questions about what happened next.


Many readers have asked if the Reichenbach Fall happens in this universe or not. Here is the answer.

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On Pins and Needles: The Ascent

By J. Baillier and Seven Percent

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 _ **'Come and play. Tower Hill. Jim Moriarty x'**_

Sherlock passes John his phone so that he can have a look at the text message, too.

John leans back in his chair, regarding him with suspicion and alarm. "Are you ready for this?" he asks.

They both know why he's asking. By all intents and purposes, Sherlock is recovered – has been for some time – but Moriarty was always going to be the ultimate test. He would have been the most formidable foe even if Sherlock had never been stricken with Guillain-Barré.

The arrival of this day and such a message is hardly unexpected. The only surprising thing about how things have played out is that Sherlock would never have anticipated that the illness that nearly ruined him would be a catalyst in him finding his greatest weapon: John Watson – completely and thoroughly _his John_ , that is. They've survived through hell together. A well-tailored, Irish career criminal genius should be a walk in Regent's park compared to that.

He won't make the mistake of underestimating James Moriarty. But, during these past twelve months, John has taught him not to underestimate himself, either, even if he had lost hope of ever regaining control over his life.

He sits down on the armrest of John's chair. "Me? Maybe. The two of us, together? _Absolutely_."

––– **A YEAR LATER –––**

"Where's Darren?" Sherlock inquires immediately as he climbs onto the seat of the banged-up jeep in which Jonathan has arrived. He had been asked to join one of the weekend day trips to climbing sites within a reasonable distance from London Jonathan frequently plans with friends, so it seems strange only to find one person in the car.

"Landed a wee bit short of his bouldering pad last week, broke his ankle. He lent me the car – he said we might as well go without him."

"Generous."

Sherlock has met Darren Weathers – the owner of First Ascent – several times. He is a quiet, meticulous sort of fellow, who Sherlock had caught looking at the scars on the crooks of his elbows when he'd once been belaying John at the climbing centre. Before Sherlock had had a chance to formulate a verbal repellent, Darren – who had nary said a word to him before – had slid up the left sleeve of his shirt and shown him a set of similar, scarred puncture wounds. "No judgment here, mate," Darren had said and then wandered off.

While Sherlock would never count himself as part of any climbing group, he finds that the fellow climbers Jonathan has introduced to him and John offer easy and uncomplicated company. There is the climbing to discuss instead of the general awkwardness of small talk with new people, and many of them have chosen a lifestyle outside the norm just as Sherlock does. There's respect there for being different and doing one's own thing in the culture Sherlock appreciates.

"John's not coming, either?" Jonathan inquires while releasing the handbrake and checking his dead angle.

"He's attending a party – Sarah, from the clinic he used to locum at, is leaving to work in New Zealand. Parties are hardly something I enjoy, so John let me off the hook and said that we might as well go climbing without him."

"Generous," Jonathan quips back and Sherlock's lip curls into a slight smile.

"Has he hung up his harness for good, then?" Jonathan asks as he turns on the turning signal.

"It seems to be too much for the shoulder, yes," Sherlock says.

They head out to mid-morning traffic, continuing down Baker Street towards where it turns into a part of Portman Square. It's not the best route at this hour, but Sherlock politely refrains from commenting. Jonathan doesn't mind his abrasiveness, and he isn't entirely sure why he nowadays feels like making a greater effort with people he likes. Maybe John is rubbing off on him.

"I thought we might go to Harrison's Rocks," Jonathan suggests; "it's top roping and bouldering only since the soft rock can't withstand sports climbing bolts or trad gear. It's a good place for a first timer on outside walls, and the landscape is interesting."

Sherlock digs out his phone from his pocket, glancing towards the back seat. Two large, black bags have been thrown there, presumably full of ropes and other climbing gear belonging to Jonathan; Sherlock had been instructed only to bring his shoes and harness and something to drink. Early into his climbing career, he had become convinced that the torture devices lent to climbers at First Ascent could not be the best on offer, so he had done some research and relatively quickly acquired his own gear.

He opens a browser window on the phone and starts typing search words. After a few minutes of web browsing, he asks: "According to this, Harrison's Rocks has approximately two hundred routes, notable examples of periglacial tor formations, and it is managed by the British Mountaineering Council. What sort of difficulty are we talking about?"

Jonathan is leaning forward in his seat, trying to discern why the traffic has ground to a halt at the junction of the A5204 and Tottenham Court Road. "Fours and fives, for the most part, a few sixes."

Before life had thrown a wrench into his climbing exercise schedule, Sherlock had advanced to being able to take on 6-graded routes on inside walls. Sherlock is expecting Jonathan to bring the primary reason for his hiatus up sooner or later: James Moriarty.

Besides a change of scenery and a chance to experience climbing actual rock, there is a third reason for the need to head out of London: First Ascent has closed its doors temporarily. A Council grant Darrell had applied for, which had been stuck in the slow gears of government for years, had finally come through. Apparently _'some bigshot from Home Office_ ', as Jonathan had phrased it, had put political pressure on the matter with some well-placed phone calls. The grant will enable full renovations in the climbing centre, and also allow hiring permanent staff, the first of which will be Darren himself. First Ascent will lose the peace and quiet and the sense of privacy which Sherlock had always enjoyed, but at least there will be no risk of the place being shut down permanently due to lack of funds for upkeep.

Before Sherlock can pose any further questions about their destination, both of their mobiles signal incoming text messages, one after another. Jonathan quickly scans his while waiting for a light to turn green, and then turns the screen to face the shotgun seat. "Somebody loves you," he teases.

'PLEASE BRING HIM HOME IN ONE PIECE DONT LET HIM DO ANYTHING STUPID,' the message reads, and the sender designation is _John W_.

Sherlock unlocks his own mobile. The culprit of it chiming with a text message ringtone turns out to be the very same person, although in Sherlock's phone the ID reads _'John Watson, ICE_ '.

'JUST THIS ONCE DONT DO ANYTHING STUPID PLEASE,' the message says.

Sherlock snorts and pockets the phone. "He always forgoes proper punctuation in written communication, not just when he's worried."

"I half expected reporters in front of your place," Jonathan says. "After everything," he adds pointedly.

Here they go, then. "Media interest waned once they could no longer juice up the story of the sociopath detective who hired an actor to play his archenemy."

"But they did clear your reputation?"

"Only negative news gets any significant attention – nobody reads the corrections afterwards, and they're always on some back page in tiny font anyway."

"That one article was just vile, what was her name again – Riley? The way she dug even into John's army service was just-" Jonathan shakes his head. "I know she almost exposed the two of you afterwards when you were in hiding."

After Moriarty was dead, there had still been the problem of ensuring that there wasn't some second-in-command ready to step in and avenge his boss' demise. That threat had been... eliminated. The details he and John will take to their graves. Sherlock would feel immensely guilty for what they'd had to do if John hadn't already killed a man for him once before and giggled about it.

"John couldn't resist trying to refute her claims. Mycroft's suing her, by the way. I told him not to bother, but he has all sorts of old-fashioned ideas about Holmes family honour."

They continue their drive towards the outer boroughs in silence. Sherlock knows Jonathan will probably ask for further details, most of which he can now divulge. Seven weeks ago, when they had still been in the thick of it all, he had told the man it was better he knew as little as possible outside of his own role.

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

Although popular and thus worn down by many a climber's limb, Harrison's Rocks do turn out to be an interesting place from Sherlock's perspective. The geology is just _delectable_.

The contours of the cliffs are round and soft, jutting towards the sky in the midst of lush, green woodland. Ancient-looking trees have grown their gnarly roots into the rock faces. The air is chilly, but the sun has warmed the porous surface of the limestone enough that it will likely be possible to climb several routes before having to take a break to warm up.

Since it's a weekday, only one other pair of climbers are present, and they're keeping their distance, filming each other's climbs.

Jonathan leads Sherlock along a footpath which meanders between two rock faces, and at one point they must duck under a boulder wedged between. They're both carrying a heavy amount of gear, but instead of exhausting – as it would have been all those months ago when he had first started climbing – to Sherlock it now merely feels like a good warm-up.

After a few minutes more of walking, they arrive at the edge of the rockier area on a hillside where a wide view of the surrounding farmlands opens. Jonathan has already sprinted up a narrow path carved into the cliff side by countless of feet. Soon, two lines of rope trail down, making a snapping noise against the rock a few feet as they descend to where Sherlock is standing. After a few minutes, the ropes begin swinging as Jonathan abseils down. He then offers Sherlock the end of one of them. They are both now strapped into their harnesses and climbing shoes.

They tie figure-of-eight knots and thread the rope through an ATC without a word, enjoying the solitude of the location and the anticipation of the climb.

To Sherlock, London has felt somewhat claustrophobic lately. Some of its sense of privacy, of being able to get lost in a crowd has been lost, due to his recent infamy. It has also not been the safest of places for him to be, thanks to Moriarty and the remnants of the man's criminal network. It's still hard to shake the feeling that he and John and everyone else connected to their lives are in constant danger, someone watching them every minute. Maybe things still are that way, since Sherlock has never been short of enemies.

Then again, he has never had an ally as formidable as the one who's most likely getting dressed in their bedroom for his party right now. Instead of having to face things alone, there are many willing to come to his aid, now. Sherlock can't quite grasp what things he has done to inspire such loyalty, but at least John seems unsurprised. John has always thought better of him than anyone else.

If it wasn't for John Sherlock would have never taken up climbing as physical therapy after the GBS. If it wasn't for the last year spent with him, Sherlock would have never been successful in defeating Moriarty and then going on to tackle the network that was his legacy – he would still be stuck trying to recover while having utterly lost belief and himself and motivation to keep going.

As he ties off the figure of eight, he looks at the third finger of his left hand, which is mildly tingling. These sorts of pins and needles would have frightened him, before; perhaps he's finally making an uneasy truce with the fact that his illness might reappear one day. He knows that this is _not_ the GBS that had started him off on this journey; he'd damaged the finger in a knife fight in Lugarno, three months after he and John had left London to take care of... business. He is rather fond of the scar on the side of the knuckle – it reminds him that John had managed to deflect the blow that would have put one of Sherlock's eyes out.

It has been a strange two years since the first tingle heralded the start of the GBS.

Scratch that. It's been a strange _lifetime_ so far.

There had been a plan in place that would have allowed him and John to fake their deaths, but Moriarty's demise and John's success in making sure the assassins assigned to them and their friends could not finish their jobs had allowed Sherlock to forgo having to fake jumping off a roof and John to forgo pretending to have been shot in the head. During their travels, the British press had still believed that the Richard Brook story had been real, which had diverted many other enemies' gaze away from them. Once they returned, they'd been able to provide proof of what really happened. The fact that so many had instantly been willing to rally behind their cause had been a wake-up call. These individuals had risked their jobs, their reputations for him and John, instead of turning away to protect themselves. He must've done something right, along the way. He's not used to this – people liking him for _him_. John insists it's not just because he's there by Sherlock's side.

Even Anderson had, somehow, become his great defender. A strange life, indeed.

Sherlock closes his eyes as he places his palms on the warm, coarse rock face.

"Belay on," Jonathan tells him, a smile deepening his tenor tone.

"Climbing."

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

"I'd better look out once you get a couple more years under your belt. Pupil excelling the master and all that," Jonathan says and gulps down half a water bottle.

"Hardly. You've been doing this far longer than me, and this place doesn't even compare to the Swiss Alps." Sherlock doesn't bother untying the rope from his harness before taking a seat on a rock next to a route called _Bloody Fingers_. It has proven worthy of its description. Rated at 6a puts it at the very edge of Sherlock's current abilities.

"Any travel plans for the summer?" he asks Jonathan.

"Even if I do end up going somewhere, it's not going to be Spain. Broke up with Roxana. The long-distance thing wasn't working for us and I should have admitted that sooner."

In the car, Jonathan had told him of his decision to take up a full-time job at London Bridge Hospital's Critical Care Unit. Sherlock's opinion is that Jonathan is well suited for working at such a unit. At the National Hospital of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Sherlock would have picked him over any other nurse on offer, especially for the abysmally lonely and claustrophobic nights he'd endured.

The fact that he has been thinking about Jonathan's employment situation is a sign of how he has changed – he never used to pay this sort of attention to the minutiae people's lives. Maybe it's John's influence once again. Pointless, but such attention does seem to make people respond to him more kindly than before. Working so closely with John over the past year had shown him the value, and taught him the practical techniques of _caring_.

"No more Vault, then?" Sherlock asks, dipping his head between his legs as black dots begin dancing in his visual field. It's still hard to tell when he's at risk of overexerting himself. The GBS is long gone, but sometimes he's not entirely sure if it hasn't left behind some permanent issues with his stamina. When he voices such suspicions John just laughs says something along the lines of ' _welcome to getting older, Sherlock_ '. Still, he knows he manages fine when it comes to the Work. Climbing is the only thing where any strength issues manifest themselves.

Sherlock grabs his own water bottle with shaky, magnesium-coated and thoroughly scrape-covered fingers and pours a bit from it down his sweaty neck, not caring if his shirt gets wet. Judging by the state of his fingers, he'll have to call Helen to postpone her monthly visit.

Jonathan shakes his head. "I heard the Vault's in some financial trouble. They never did notice I nicked all that rope from them," he jokes.

"Pity I never got to use that abseil rig you devised at Barts," Sherlock says, straightening his spine and pushing his shoulders back. His neck protests with twinge. Not quite a cramp, but close.

Jonathan looks taken aback at the regret Sherlock has just verbalised. "I'm not sorry at _all_. I never promised it would be safe or even _work_ the way you wanted to. You'd have needed superhuman reflexes to be sure you could have hooked onto that thing right after jumping. John would have had a coronary if you'd actually done it. Even crashing down against the side of the building could have seriously injured you. How on earth did you ever convince John to let you risk it?"

Sherlock starts untying the rope from the tie-in loop in his harness. The shakiness hasn't abated, and he feels chilly. All this means that he's done for the day. Jonathan might have a few routes in him, and Sherlock is happy to belay, but taking on the rock himself would only result in frustration and sloppy mistakes. He has had to learn his limits during and after the GBS.

His thoughts drift to John, wondering what's going on at the flat. He wonders if John might have returned from the party already. The thought of John sitting in the kitchen with a mug of tea waiting for him to return is getting more and more appealing by the minute – more so than further exploration of East Sussex geology.

He glances at Jonathan, whose expression still carries the question he'd posed.

Sherlock reminds himself yet again that it's possible to talk about nearly all of it, now. For all intents and purposes, Moriarty is gone. In time, someone else might attempt to take his place, but it seems unlikely that the game would ever become as personal as it had between the two of them. He and John will never be entirely safe, based on the very nature of their work and the sorts of people it made them cross paths with, but Sherlock definitely finds some consolation in the fact that, however, their lives would end, it won't be at the hands of James Moriarty.

"Three assassins, three targets if I didn't jump, and a fourth one trained on me, in case I tried to kill Moriarty. We had always known that he'd have some sort of a dead man switch. So, if John hadn't succeeded in coordinating the elimination of the assassins, we would have had to use the Lazarus plan. Fortunately, it didn't come to that." The plan would have been the test to destruction of John's trust in him, but he does not doubt at all that they could have survived it with their wits and their relationship intact. They've survived worse. Nothing Moriarty could have thrown at them could have rivalled the feeling of finally being allowed to have John in his life in a capacity he'd always longed for, yet being completely paralysed by fear. Nothing on this earth is worse than doubting the two of them.

Had he failed to convince Moriarty to take his own life on the roof, Sherlock would have had to make use of Jonathan's rope rig design and to hope that John would be convincing with his own morbidly poetic driven-to-suicide ruse. Fake passports helped them get to Switzerland and from there began a frantic scramble to eliminate the rest of the spider web. The hardest parts of planning and preparations had befallen Mycroft, who had to avoid arousing the suspicion of Moriarty's minions while doing everything he possibly could to ensure their survival and their safe passage out of the country. As annoying as his brother tended to be, Sherlock found himself grateful for the fact that Mycroft's own covert team had been available to see to the practicalities.

Mrs Hudson and Lestrade had been left out of the plan, in order to ensure that, if push came to shove, someone would be seen genuinely mourning for him and John. Sherlock had also not wanted to alarm the old girl any more than he absolutely had to.

The fourth sniper target had been Sherlock himself. Had he not jumped after Moriarty's death and if John hadn't neutralised the man, Sherlock would have been finished off. The assassin whose rifle had been trained at him had turned out to be the new receptionist at John's surgery. John had used her own weapon to ensure that the threat of her was dealt with.

Moriarty had always underestimated John, something that Sherlock has now learned never to do.

It is _always_ John who saves him, who would walk through fire for him.

Jonathan shakes his head with an incredulous smile. "That must have been some serious James Bond shit the two of you pulled."

Sherlock has been forced to endure most of those films by John. He must admit some begrudging respect for the fictional man's determination. And his musculature.

"John is insisting we go on a holiday. Somewhere _nice and quiet_ ," Sherlock says, spitting out the last words as though they are a personal insult. He doesn't understand why they can't just enjoy the peace and quiet they've now got in London.

One day, everything will feel normal again. Whatever that means. The difference between him now and the Old Sherlock is that he's not going to go crazy with impatience waiting for that day. If the past two years have taught him anything at all, it must be that he has more patience than he ever would have believed when he needs it. He knows he must extend that patience to himself as well as others, and when he runs out of such reserves, John has enough for the both of them.

Jonathan hums thoughtfully and begins packing up.

––– **The End –––**

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 **Authors' Notes:** It is good to be back! The main parts of this series are over and done with, but as promised, there are still unanswered questions, and moments in time we will be exploring through short stories in this 'verse. Many of them have been at least partly inspired by the wonderful comments sections of " _2007_ " and " _On the Rack_ ". We love hearing from you.


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